glass houses
by Gray Doll
Summary: Lisbon visits a murderer in his cell. [AU, allusions to Jane/Lisbon]


_(notes at the end of the story - said end is important for the plot of this one)_

_*edit* I don't know what happened, I accidentally added a chapter here that was meant to go elsewhere - sorry for the confusion, but there isn't a chapter two!_

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**Glass Houses**

He has no idea how long he's been in this cell.

Quarantine is, without a shadow of doubt, hellishly boring.

Hours pass, days. Weeks – months, for all he knows. In the permanent grayness of his prison, there are no shadows and there is no movement of light for him to measure the time. Guards come, and guards leave (they always change, the same man never comes here twice and it almost makes him smirk, because oh, are they afraid he's going to sway them if they do?), a plateful of uninviting fare every time, and water. In the earlier days, he'd thought about refusing the food altogether, about letting the inevitable gnawing in his stomach grow until his entire body became numb.

He lifts his hands, the movement slow and lethargic, and the soft clink of the cuffs is music after such a long silence. Starvation, he has decided, is for martyrs. For unthinking fools who resign themselves to their fate, and Red John is neither. How much better to wait, to plan, to think, to defy death as easily as he used to inflict it on others.

Somehow, he senses her arrival before any physical sign of her is here.

(Most likely because a small part of him had been waiting for her to come for days, weeks, maybe even months now).

A petite, slender silhouette, in the far corner of the long wide wall separating his cell from the corridor. Light steps, the splay and rhythm of her feet familiar, _pit pat pit pat_, a slight, sensible heel. Something is off – the beats don't hit exactly, something in the fall of her feet is slightly irregular – he closes his eyes, and imagines the calf twisted somehow, perhaps a muscle turned the wrong way, the hamstring pulled taught and bruised-

"Leave us," comes the quiet command, and his faceless guards make their way out, but they halt not too far away, always present, always ready.

His eyes open. He smiles, but doesn't turn his head. "Ah."

She doesn't reply. He can feel her silent presence on the other side of the cell's thick glass, can feel her careful eyes on him and he can almost taste the tension in her throat, something almost like hate radiating off her, almost tangible.

When he does turn his head, it takes his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the sight.

She looks older. There's a line between her brows that he remembers seeing before but it was always smaller, thinner, showing only when she frowned. Her mouth is stern, her lips pressed tightly together, and it looks like what softness they ever had has now gone, never to return. There are shadows like bruises under her eyes and the muscles in her throat stand taught, she is putting the majority of her weight on her left leg, and her fists are clenched.

He tilts his head back, blinks indolently at her, and smiles.

(He decides he can taunt her, just a bit.)

"Have you come to _kill_ me, Agent Lisbon?" he asks, lightly.

Her shoulders tense, as if she is trying to hold back a flinch. Her throat works, and he could almost laugh, let the breath out of his lungs in a great rush if he didn't think it was beyond his strength and capacity. God, he'd missed this.

He had, dare he think it, missed her.

Before his fall, before his capture, before the lie – or rather, he thinks, before the lie was discovered – he'd been a man watching her from afar and she'd been a woman torn, torn between her heart and her mind, seeking out the rights and wrongs of life. Before, he had been a man with a haunted past and a self-righteous journey, and she had been a woman keeping everything around her grounded, save for herself.

Before, before, _before; _before she _knew –_ before she found out – she still had a smile, bright and warm and blooming, and a laugh like a bird taking flight, soaring above and beyond everything they both had ever known. He remembers that laugh – it used to ring through the crowded offices, past the agents and criminals and mourning relatives and _everyone_; he remembers with painful clarity the incline of her throat, the curve of her nape as she leaned upward, leaned close.

He blinks now, and finds that his hands are clenched.

"I'm not here to hurt you," she says quietly. Her green eyes are bright, darting, quick, as if she is trying to take in every last inch of him. How talentless at guile she had always been. How straightforward and true – he will do well to remember that, also. "I'm here to talk."

Something is rising in the back of his throat. "And is that," he asks, trying to swallow it down, "actually going to involve talking?"

But she doesn't flush, as he'd expected her to. Instead she looks at him steadily, calmly, quietly. Tough-as-nails Senior Agent has grown, it seems. She is given more to cunning now than statute, more given to compromise than putting away the bad guys. "You tried to kill me," she says now, voice steady.

His teeth come down hard on the inside of his cheek, until he can taste copper. When he moves again, it is a simple shrug of the shoulders, nonchalant, dispassionate. "And what of it?"

She stares at him for a while, then turns and walks out of his sight.

For a moment, there is nothing, and he allows his head to fall back, allows his eyes to close, allows a ragged breath to pass through his lips and he can breathe, _finally_, there is air in the cell again and he can think, without her suffocating presence on the other side, watching staring, eyes green and cool and filled with hatred-

The door to his cell opens, and she steps inside.

Her eyes are fire, blazing, and ice at the same time; cold, hard, unforgiving. "When they told me it was you, I didn't believe them," she says, and the closer she steps the smaller the room seems, the smaller he feels. "I didn't believe them when they told me _you_'d killed all those people, I didn't believe them when they brought you here, tied up and muzzled like a beast. I didn't even believed them when you turned away from me in the interrogation room with that sick _smile_ on your face. Your family-"

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. When she opens them, she's stoic again.

"I have no family," he spits at her. "I am alone, and I am _deluded_, and I found it was my choice – just like my Agent Teresa Lisbon, with all her pretenses to independence, trying to beat the loving fool out of her with a gun and a badge-"

Her fist hits him square in the jaw, and for a moment his vision blurs. A trickle of blood runs down the corner of his mouth – from when he bit the inside of his cheek or from when she punched him, he cannot tell for sure. She's breathing hard.

"Get up," she snaps at him. "Get up, you are my-"

"I am your _nothing_," he says, with a wide grin that doesn't reach his eyes. "My, my, Agent, you are behind on the news-"

She hauls him to his feet with a strength that shouldn't be surprising, not any more, slams him back against the wall in a savage display of hatred. Her voice is low in her throat, curling down his spine, when she says, "_Now_ I believe."

His fingers twitch. There is a tendril of hair tucked behind her ear that has fallen from the rest, curling loosely at the base of her neck, at the incline of bone; an oddly intimate, strangely fragile sight. He follows the length of it to where it curls lightly against the stark rise of her collarbone. Once upon a time, that strand of hair would have been alive, would have been bright.

Once upon a time, he would have curled it around his fingers.

They were friends once, were they not? They were friends and they were not friends, they were lovers that never were, they revolved around each other like the planets revolve around the sun, the same distance in between; never touching, never close enough except when the sun is absent. They were friends but they were not friends, they were lovers but were not in love, they cared but never enough and God, is this what it comes down to? The constant _almost, not enough_.

He can remember the color of her eyes when the moon had reflected in them, the smile on her face when they had danced, the way her mouth had curved against his. But he can't, for the life of him, remember her in the light, in the open; he can't remember ever taking her hand where the world could see, ever allowing himself to acknowledge whatever they had was.

He can't remember it ever being more than _almost_.

When she loosens her hands from his shoulders, her eyes close and she turns away. Suddenly, he is finding it hard to breathe. "There is a new one," she says quietly.

He is watching the incline of her nape, watching her lift her hand to her mouth, watching her fist clench and unclench.

"There is a new one, and he's targeting us. He's already killed more than twenty people" she carries on. "In a few days, the FBI will come to you. They are in negotiations with the CBI director as we speak. They will come to you, and ask for your help, help until the day of your trial. And you will help them."

"What makes you so sure of that?" he asks, trying to make it sound light, without force. "Should I help them out of some collegial affection?" He gives a small laugh, barely audible. "They must be truly deluded, if they think some past dalliance between _partners_, already forgotten, will move my heart. Or my hand."

"You're apparently the only one talking about dalliances." She turns to face him, and now her hand is on her hip, close to her gun. "You will help the FBI. You will do what must be done, until the day of your trial, and your eventual execution. And it won't be for the FBI, or the CBI, or me. It'll be because if you don't, you'll stay here and rot. You will be a vessel of a man waiting to die, useless and powerless. And after your death, no one will remember your name, no one will care, not for the horrible things you've done and not for the great ones, either. You will be _nothing_. And you will know that you will have failed not me, not your friends, not your family, but yourself. And you'll die an ugly, sad and lonely man."

His throat works, and there is something cruel in her eyes, a cold light glinting ceaselessly as she picks up a single thread and unravels the whole thing.

"That can't be all," he says, voice now strained. "You know the first chance I get, I'll put a knife in their backs and be off before they realize it."

She inclines her head. "Yes," she says calmly. "Would you put the knife in my back, as well?"

Her question doesn't take him off guard. "No," he says, and it's the truth. "But theirs – yes."

"And you know I'll chase you to the ends of the world for it. I won't let anyone else commit this crime, but I will do it myself – when you do this, when you run, I will kill you."

"Is that a promise?" he asks, softly. "I'm honored."

_Don't think I'll risk my life time and time again, trying to save you, trying to bring you back every time_, she had told him once, after an impossible ruse to catch the killer gone wrong.

"Yes," she says after a while, voice cold and quiet – and there's something in it, something more, something he will dream of for the rest of his days. "It is a promise, Jane."

_We're all liars here_, he thinks as she leaves. _This world makes liars of us all; these gray walls make even the most truthful of men into conmen_.

_One day, you'll catch me_. Patrick Jane smiles, and sits back to wait.

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**Notes:** I wrote this one-shot ages ago, near the end of season three, when I started toying with this particular idea, and I couldn't resist writing something, _anything,_ about it. I was never a big fan of this concept, but I have to admit it _is_ interesting. Thank you for reading!


End file.
